Webkit Makes Mobile Software Testing Easy

July 18, 2010

I’m still waiting anxiously to get my new Droid X. I’ve been happy with my Motorola Droid but the power connector got pinched, probably by me anxiously plugging it in, and now it’s really fussy as to which power cables it will take a charge from. All that as I’m about to take off to see a client in New York.

Meanwhile though Andy Cohen has been feverishly developing our MVVM based mobile staffing software – a super upgrade from our existing mobile app – and he’s figured out ways to make the Droid rendering incredibly attractive.

One way he’s able to do that is to take advantage of webkit, the open source technology underlying the Droid browser. So he’s able to test the mobile interface right on his desktop as he programs – switching between Visual Studio and a webkit based browser like Chrome or Safara - as opposed to having to flip back and forth from desktop to Droid and back.

Webkit was originally developed by Apple for its Mac OSX, which itself is an extension of the NeXT operating system created by Steve Jobs during his exile from Apple in the late 1980s. I got my first dose of hard core object-oriented programming on NeXT at the University of Iowa in 1990. It was quite slick back then (snazzier than my Mac Pro is today) and honestly I’m not surprised to see its innovations continue on to this day.

With all the bad press Apple is getting these days (seems everyone I know is down on them for the Iphone 4 reception problems and subsequent PR mishandling), it’s intriguing to note their roots in thinking differently about software. Webkit’s underlying WebCore and JavaScriptCore components are 100% open source under the GNU license.